Here is the fantastic article that was featured in the UK's Times:Posh Frocks
Even as a spotty teenager, Victoria Beckham was never good at singing, she admits. But she always liked clothes. Following the launch of her own fashion label, she defends her status as its sole designer and explains the power of visualisation. - By Lisa Armstrong
Ah Posh, Becks and those gilded marital thrones. Seems so long ago - the irreverence, the deliberate bad taste, the cheeky Cool Britannia, self-referential irony. Actually, for all any of us know the Beckhams were in deadly earnest about their Louis-something (Louis what, though? Walsh? Vuitton?) chairs. But they had the nous, albeit after all 949 intimate wedding photos had appeared in OK! magazine, to claim that they were being tongue in cheek.
These days Victoria (they don't really get what Posh means in America) is more interested in being tongue in chic. Turns out that being part of the biggest-selling British girl band yet, with its immortal catchphrase “girl power”, was a bit of a detour. What Victoria really, really wanted was to be a designer.
Not that she's ungrateful for her past. She doesn't even mind the “Posh” sobriquet any more. “But,” as she points out, “being in the Spice Girls, fashion-wise probably didn't open any doors. If anything it shut doors and I've had to bang them down.”
Nuke them, more like, which is how we come to be sitting face to face across a vast expanse of black leather sofa in the Battersea offices of Simon Fuller, pop mogul/mentor. Fuller's world of leather is flanked by images of the famous faces whom he represents - Emma Bunton and, of course, the Beckhams, artlessly executing that mean, moody yet simultaneously loved-up thing that they do, which I'm sure isn't as easy as it looks.
The pictures are pretty big, which makes Victoria in the flesh (or lack of) all the more startling: big brown eyes orbited with lots of iridescent grey shadow, she is cross-legged in black tights, sedate black vintage silk dress (thigh-length but modest as a nun's habit from the waist up), black leather Belstaff jacket, black suede Louboutin bootees (present from David), a ton of diamonds at her ears and on one long, slender finger (more presents from David). With that spiky pixie crop (much better than the Pob), she is really rather pretty in real life, with clear, golden skin and the rod-like posture that comes from having a ballet teacher nag you for ten of your most formative years. She looks like an illustration from Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. Only thinner, obviously.
Personally, I question the wisdom of doing an interview straight after you've stepped off a ten-hour flight from LA. Her PR says that she's used to it, but she may have forgotten what it's like to be monstered by a mob of British paparazzi who are not, in Victoria's opinion, proper paparazzi at all because they “jump on your car and shove you around until they get a reaction”.
Once she arrives in Battersea there's a 30-minute delay while nerves are soothed - and probably make-up applied, because when she appears, apologising for the delay, her face has a camera-ready look that couldn't have been achieved in the back of a car being chased by half the country's photographers. There are paps, bodyguards and various blacked-out Range Rovers circling the office. Does she want to postpone, I ask (hell, it has only taken ten months to arrange). No, says her PR. She won't be back for a while. She doesn't spend much time in Britain any more, despite still owning Beckingham Palace in Hertfordshire. And yes, I think it was something we said.
The paps and the bodyguards - even her children have them - are facts of life now. Is it worth it? “Sometimes, like today, I ask myself that question,” she grimaces. “But in LA at least we can be freer. I think the obsession with celebrity is actually worse here than in America.”
Oh well. She's here now, and it's to see the four members of her design team, who work closely (via fax, e-mail and lots of photos) with her on her collection, which she calls “my fourth child”. Like most celebrity behemoths, the Beckhams have more than fulfilled their duty in the field of sunglasses, denim and perfume launches. But this latest venture - the line of ten dresses that Victoria launched at New York Fashion Week in September - is different. For a start, it's very good: limited in scope to the wasp-waisted, just-below-the-knee pencil-skirted, Fifties-inspired silhouettes that she has latterly favoured in her own wardrobe, but beautifully executed in luxurious fabrics and with the kind of attention to detail that maybe only a woman could muster: tiny bust darts so you don't spend the evening yanking up a strapless dress; internal corsetry and countless hidden hooks, eyes and fastenings to keep everything firmly in check. So, naturally, everyone has been asking who really designed them - Roland Mouret or Giambattista Valli (two of her favourite designers, who favour the same silhouette), perhaps? Clearly there is a seed in us that can't quite believe Victoria Beckham capable of much more than going into Hermès and ordering another ten Birkins.
So I ask her. Without apparently taking offence (she has been fighting cynicism since she started school), she tells me that she does the designing. “Do I draw? No. Then again, nor do lots of designers. But I put it all on myself and walk around in it, and I know what feels comfortable. I know how a dress should sit. I've worn so many in the past and when I see the photographs I think, crikey, my boobs are up round my neck again because the corsets are too short and not cut high enough. Like I knew I would spend a lot on the best-quality zips because, like many women, I've had my share of crappy zips. I wanted a zip that undoes from both ends because then you can either put the dress on over your head or, if you don't want to mess up your hair, you can step into it - and also, you know, going to the loo wouldn't be this whole big palaver.”
Here we have the essence of Victoria Beckham: polite, dogged, with a tendency to launch into somewhat flatly delivered monologues. She refers constantly to her sense of humour and how funny Karl Lagerfeld thinks she is, but comes across - today, at least - as laconic, with a nice line in self-deprecation, rather than a laser-sharp wit. There is a marked inclination towards being ladylike but ultimately, and endearingly, Eliza Doolittle.
Anyway, I checked with Roland Mouret to see how much he had been involved and he swears that he only helped her to find her pattern-cutter and seamstress. Then again, he, too, works for Simon Fuller, so people will probably still be sceptical.
I think it has her fingerprints all over it. “I was so nervous,” she says of the collection's launch in her suite at the Waldorf, “that for days before I drank loads and loads of water. God, I'm square.” In the end she impressed a cynical posse of hand-picked journalists and buyers with her product and her knowledge.
Yes, they cost £650 to £1,900. No, they don't come in a size 16, despite Victoria's avowed ambition to dress Nigella Lawson. But they are modern without being gimmicky “because in these recessionary times, and at these prices, women are looking for something that will be an investment, aren't they?” asks Victoria.
This is a rhetorical question, I assume, but it's a nice touch because I can't be alone in wondering whether the R word (recession, not Roland) has impinged on planet Beckham, and whether - thinking the unthinkable for a moment - the economic downturn may make inflated celebrities such as the Beckhams seem like dinosaurs. But she even knows about carbon footprints, which is apparently why she and David don't have a private jet but slum it in first class.
What must it be like, at 34, to feel that your greatest success is behind you? This is a poignant question, for we are sitting in the same offices where five mouthy hopefuls pitched their then unsigned album to Fuller 14 years ago. “We all looked like we did later on when people thought we'd been manufactured. We even had our nicknames. Emma had her bunches, Mel C had her tracksuit on. I had a little black dress that everyone said was Gucci, which it wasn't - it was Miss Selfridge.”
And so, we see, all roads lead back to fashion with Victoria, which is brilliant because it suggests that the best is still to come. As creative director, no less, of DVB - brand Beckham - she's in it for the long haul. “I was never that good a singer but I think I am good at fashion. Even when I was at school, where I was bullied - sometimes physically, sometimes verbally - I was always customising my uniform.”
Here's a conundrum. In her 2000 autobiography Learning To Fly, named after the lyrics of the title song of her favourite (how appropriate) film, Fame, it's pretty clear that Victoria Adams, as she then was, was hellbent on being a singer. Or perhaps that's just how you behave if your parents have spent years chauffeuring you across Hertfordshire in their Roller (to her chagrin she was actually born in Essex) to dance and music lessons, and you have had nothing but horrible boyfriends and teachers who keep putting you down. There is a hint, in the way she talks about her not entirely illustrious years at Laine Theatre Arts, that her parents were living a few unfulfilled stage ambitions via their daughters (her younger sister Louise also attended). Her dad had sung in a couple of bands before he set up his successful electronics company, her mum had danced. The teenage Victoria was “overweight, spotty, mediocre and given a general inferiority complex”. Later, in the Spice Girls, she was the only member who didn't get a solo on the immortal Wannabe because she had been at a wedding when they divvied up the lines. “Honestly, I could have crawled on stage and died at that point and no one would have taken any notice.”
This self-deprecation is disarming, but you don't storm Simon Fuller's office at the age of 20 if you badly lack confidence. Nor, logic suggests, do you stage a comeback ten years after your peak. By far the biggest cheers at the O2 show I saw last January were for her - and she didn't even attempt a solo, unlike her bandmates, but confined herself to pretending to be on a catwalk surrounded by photographers in a routine that somewhat self-consciously sent herself up.
Nor do you launch yourself into the notoriously bitchy fashion industry. Do you?
Victoria's take is that she is a positive person. “I'm just really happy. I wake up every morning and I think I'm so blessed. I don't read the stuff that's written about us. I'm not interested in gossip. Some of the people that I'm friends with in America - you know, Tom and Katie - they get it too and we laugh about all these stupid things.”
This doesn't quite tally with the autobiography, in which she wrote that what unsettled her and David about the blanket coverage was how accurate some of it was. Nor does it chime with those who say that when they worked with her she would tip off the press about her whereabouts.
Perhaps that's all in the past. She wouldn't be the first celebrity to have an ambivalent, addictive relationship with fame. And she certainly seems to have settled into a contented modus vivendi in LA with her boys (who have American accents now) in the house that she and Kelly Hoppen slaved to get ready so that when David, Brooklyn, Romeo and Cruz showed up “they could literally drop their suitcases in the hall and find that dinner was on” (she is nothing if not an old-fashioned adoring wife).
When David transfers to Milan for eight weeks in January, she will - perhaps mindful of the fallout when she failed to move properly with him to Madrid - spend as much time with him there as she can, given that the Beckhams are not taking their boys out of school in America. In LA, she says, there is much more privacy: “They have these driveways and there's a law that forbids photographing on private land, so when I pick the kids up from school we never get papped.”
What she does miss, though, is not being able to wear coats. So there she is, coatless in the forever summer of LA, driving to and fro along its freeways to school and to nine-year-old Brooklyn's football matches, twirling around in bits of calico to photograph for the team in London, rustling up the occasional cannelloni or lasagne (not that she eats red meat - besides, there is a chef cooking meals for her, David and the boys, who all like different food). She has been going to the gym lately, too, in preparation for her starring role in the new Armani lingerie campaign.
As she has it, her idea of a thrilling night is watching a DVD with David, unwinding in the bath and going to bed early with a notebook “because I'm always thinking of things in the middle of the night”. She emphatically does not travel as much as people think she does.
Nor is she plastered in make-up and hoiked into a corset dress every day. “We lead our lives in a much more low-profile way than people think. I'm not going to The Ivy in Beverly Hills. I don't think I've been to a premiere since we moved there.
“We're not courting fame. I can give you a list of numerous restaurants that have underground parking so no one can get any photographs. I know all the restaurant kitchens in LA. Underground car parks and kitchens. That's my grand entrance.”
Does one detect a soupçon of self-defensiveness in this monologue? I suppose it is inevitable. Both Beckhams have, as she might put it, had the crap kicked out of them over the years. In a funny way, I think she needs the chorus of criticism to motivate her.
The only time she seems affronted is when I remark that she appears to seek validation from people all time. “I don't really care what people think. I never made friends easily. For years, when I was in the Spice Girls, those were my four best friends and we stuck up for each other. Now I've got David. Nothing has ever come particularly naturally to me.” She shrugs. “It's made me a hard worker and very disciplined. I get that from my dad.”
She thinks she has more to give. “I really do. I still get letters from women who say that the Spice Girls changed their lives. Now I want to get a valid message out there about women, their shape, how to dress it and be healthy.” This seems a cue to ask if she actually eats. Without blanching, she tells me what she has for breakfast (fruit or wheat-free toast), lunch and dinner (lots of fish, lots of vegetables, lots of fruit. Lots of Japanese food. Really, really healthy.” I've had lunch with her and can vouch for the ingredients, although “lots” may be pushing it.
It seems a small point, but many celebrities would bridle at questions about their eating habits, let alone being asked about the authorship of their work. The nice thing about Victoria is that you can ask almost anything and she will launch into one of her well-meaning explications. At one point I asked if she liked reading (it was widely reported a few years ago that she had never made it to the end of a book - a misquote, she says). Quaintly, she thought I'd asked her if she could read, a lèse-majesté that would have ended most interviews. But instead of flouncing out, she explained sweetly that yes, she can read, and has been enjoying Harry Potter with the boys.
She will thank you for the most perfunctory compliment. It's partly her way of “tuning out the negativity”, I imagine, but it's also courtesy: “My mum and dad were real sticklers for good manners and so are me and David. People are always remarking on how well-behaved the boys are. They've all got their own headed notepaper for thank-you letters.”
Does it ever bug her that the Beckhams are caricatured as barbarians when they are clearly not? “Thank you. No, not really. I'm quite spiritual. I'm very good at visualisation.”
Uh oh. This sounds ominously like Hollywood-speak. Or maybe Tom got to them after all. But it turns out that Victoria's visuals are not the babbling brooks or still mountains kind, but clothes. “I was talking to Gordon Ramsay and David about this the other day and they're the same. Gordon visualises a meal, then figures out how to prepare it. David visualises the goal. I'll lie in bed and think, what kind of look do I want to go for tomorrow? Then I find the pieces in my mind to create it.
Sometimes she visualises her and David when they are elderly, but she doesn't think old age will be a problem for them “because we're really supportive of one another”. She pauses, thoughtfully. “Yeah, I really believe in creative visualisation.”
source: http://women.timesonline.co.uk & www.victoriabeckhamcollection.com
